Creativity without Borders? Rethinking remoteness and proximity

Abstract

This article examines remoteness and proximity as geographical conditions and metaphors. It stems from a large government-funded research project which sought to examine the extent and uniqueness of the creative industries in Darwin—a small but important city in Australia's tropical Top End region, and government and administration capital of the sparsely populated Northern Territory. In talking to creative artists from diverse fields about their work and inspiration, it became clear that geographical positionality was a key framing device through which people understood themselves and their relationships with others. Remoteness and proximity were tangible in the sense of physical distances (Darwin is remote from southern States, and yet proximate to Asia and Aboriginal country). But Darwin's location was also perceived and imagined, in cultural texts, in creative workers' discussions of Darwin in relation to the outside world, and in their sense of the aesthetic qualities of the city's creative output (particularly shaped by multicultural and Aboriginal influences). We develop our analysis from 98 interviews with creative workers and postal surveys returned by 13 festival organisers in Darwin. Qualities of distance, proximity, isolation and connection materially shape a political economy of creative industry production, and infuse how creative workers view their activities within networks of trade, exchange and mobility.

Keywords:

• Creative industries
• cultural work
• remoteness
• proximity
• networks
• Aboriginal
• multiculturalism
• Darwin

Darwin's image, since its beginnings, has been that of a government town, a place where exiles from the south fortified themselves with liquor against the loneliness and the heat, deserving of the jibe, attributed to Xavier Herbert, that its only exports were empty bottles and full public servants. (Powell 1988, p. 227)

Q: Where do you feel Darwin's strengths lie as a creative city?

A: I think its unique environmental and cultural make up, its proximity to South East Asia, its relative isolation from the rest of Australia. It is relatively intact in terms of culture and environment and I think it just offers something that is pretty special and unique to the rest of Australia and the world. (Art gallery curator, interview, July 2007)

Introduction

Darwin is a frontier city. Fifteen hours’ drive to the nearest substantial town (Alice Springs, with only 25 000 people) and 3000 km to the nearest State capital city (Adelaide), it was established by British colonisers on land taken from the Larrakia people, as a strategic northern outpost in an earlier geopolitical era when the ‘yellow peril’ and fear of northern invasion reigned (Jull 1991). Much has changed, not least from the multiple demolitions of war and cyclone. Darwin now trumpets itself as a cosmopolitan, if small (population 70 000), city with a multicultural population, modern infrastructure, busy international airport and substantial international tourism (Lea et al. 2009). Yet Darwin retains a palpable sense of solitude. Flights from other capital cities take several hours; in driving out of the city one quickly enters a brutal tropical savannah landscape: wide flooded coastal plains dominated by melaleuca forests, swampy tidal mangrove forests, and spiky pandanus. Its harsh climate of extreme heat and monsoonal storms has forced architectural adaptation and shaped the annual rhythms of economic and cultural activity. Darwin is an outpost of Australian federalism, designed principally around defence forces’ needs, the delivery of government services, and the mining and pastoral industries. A northern capital retaining its strategic military, political and resource importance, in so many ways Darwin is tangibly—and metaphorically—remote.

What might this unusual setting mean for industries other than defence, government administration and mining—such as creative industries—that are common to cities everywhere, including Darwin, but which have not until now been critical to Darwin's strategic geopolitical raison d’être? This article stems from a research project where we sought to answer this question. Funded as an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP0667445; 2005–2009), the research project's three stated aims were to determine the nature, extent and change over time of the creative industries1 in Darwin; to interrogate the applicability of national and international creative industry policy frameworks to Darwin; and to identify opportunities for local transformation in creative industries. Darwin's remote location, small size and relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups were envisaged as deep challenges to existing orthodoxies in creative industries theory and policy making (Lea et al. 2009; Luckman et al. 2009). Research was needed to understand the challenges of remoteness for creative industries, when population mass and proximity to other major centres were absent, and in a complicated (post)colonial setting such as in Darwin.

For Darwin, remoteness presents particular challenges for creative workers—being a long way from key centres and scenes in Melbourne, Sydney and further afield. Staying in touch with key gatekeepers is difficult, as is maintaining visibility in these larger markets, and there is always pressure on talented up-and-comers to move to larger centres (see Bennett, this issue). And yet Darwin has its own forms of geographical proximity that favourably influence its cultural economy of creative industry production and distribution. While Darwin might seem remote to southern States, it is proximate to Asia and for over a century has had prominent Asian communities in its local demographic profile (with longer-established Chinese communities now complemented by Philippine, Timorese and Indonesian populations). At the same time, Darwin is an Indigenous capital of the north, within a network of scattered, tiny Aboriginal settlements throughout Arnhem Land. Darwin is a centre for Aboriginal broadcasting, and for Indigenous visual artists, musicians, artefact producers and dancers. We sought to discover whether the flip-side of remoteness was a local cultural distinctiveness—a proximity rather than isolation, when viewed from ‘inside’ Darwin—borne of unusual combinations of cultures on the northern colonial frontier.

Also informing our project was a commitment to better understand the everyday experiences of workers in the creative industries. This commitment stemmed from ongoing critiques of creative city policy (which point to the tendency to over-glamorise creative work) and from research revealing how creative work is precarious and manifest differently across space (Gibson 2003; Gill & Pratt 2008; Ross 2008; Reimer 2009). Our focus on everyday experiences of creative workers required a ‘grassroots’ approach: creative workers literally produce the creative city through their everyday practices, working lives, movements, and imaginations of their city in wider cultural and economic flows (see Brennan-Horley, this issue). While in the national geopolitical imagination Darwin might be remoteness personified, those actually living and working there manage and contest that reality on a daily basis. We focus here on the manner in which creative workers grapple with remoteness and proximity and the difficulties these geographical conditions present. But we also seek to move beyond this, to discuss how distance is disavowed and alternative opportunities sought—how the constraints of isolation are tested, and its pleasures realised.

Method

After a pilot interview (with 14 people) in April 2007, 84 interviews were conducted over 11 months, with workers in a range of creative occupations—including activities normally associated with creative industries such as music, visual art and design, as well as vernacular creative occupations as contrasting as dance, tattooing and whip-making. Sampling methods included: web searches and listings in the Darwin Yellow Pages; recommendations from colleagues; snowballing from one interviewee to others; and eventually receiving expressions of interest from potential interviewees (once word had spread about the project). Two interview schedules were used: one for those whose primary work was a creative activity and another for those whose primary source of income was not in the creative industries (see Luckman et al. 2009). Many of the questions were overtly geographical in nature, prompting participants to discuss where they lived, worked, networked, sought inspiration and saw creative activity concentrated in Darwin. Interviewees were asked to draw on a paper map of Darwin as they vocalised their responses to these questions. In-depth analysis of this embedded mapping component of our interviews is not a feature of this article (but see Brennan-Horley, this issue, and Brennan-Horley & Gibson 2009). Of relevance here, though, these questions sharpened interviewees’ general geographical literacy across the whole interview. It is worth noting that the themes of this article—remoteness, proximity, isolation—were consciously discussed by interviewees possibly because we encouraged them to talk in geographical terms, using a map as visual prompt.

Beyond mapping questions, interviewees were asked about their experience of Darwin's creative industries and factors enabling and/or impeding Darwin as a creative city. Questions included:

• What is your involvement in Darwin's creative industries?

• Where do you feel Darwin's strengths lie as a creative city?

• What makes it easy to go about your business in Darwin?

• What impediments to creativity do you perceive in Darwin?

• What resources do you use as a creative worker?

These questions resonated in a context where policy development for creative industries has been intermittent and modest: the city has tended to favour mining and tourism as its main economic development concerns, with ‘the arts’ (rather than ‘creative industries’) receiving some government support as necessary civic cultural activities, part of the city's broader agenda to be a ‘northern capital’ rather than an economic development concern.

The final combined sample had the following characteristics: 89 per cent had their creative activity as their main occupation; slightly over 50 per cent were women; most were in their 30s or 40s (60 interviewees were aged between 30 and 50, with only nine under 30); interviewees were from 29 different ethnic backgrounds (including 10 people from several different tribal Aboriginal backgrounds) and were involved in 46 different creative activities (see Table 1). On balance, the sample was slightly older than was expected (probably a function of the predominance of full-time creative workers rather than part-timers or fledging young artists) and was a little disappointing for its proportional inclusion of Indigenous creative workers, although Aboriginal people were a notable presence in the sample. Statistical analysis of Darwin's creative workforce undertaken separately for the project revealed that Aboriginal people are numerically under-represented in the creative industries in Darwin compared to Darwin's total population (Gibson & Brennan-Horley 2007). That city-wide under-representation was reflected in our interview sample.

Table 1. Types of creative workers interviewed, 2007–08 (+ number of interviews)

Actor (5)	Dancer (2)	Multimedia designer (3)
Actor/director (1)	Designer (1)	Musician (7)
Advertiser (1)	Director (1)	Performing artist (4)
Architect (7)	Educator (4)	Photographer (6)
Artist (5)	Entertainment reporter (1)	Playwright (1)
Artistic director (5)	Festival and event manager (5)	Printmaker (1)
Arts administrator (22)	Filmmaker (2)	Promoter (3)
Arts retailer (2)	Goldsmith/jeweller (2)	Publishing (3)
Author (3)	Graphic designer (1)	Retail (2)
Building designer (1)	Horticulturalist and landscape	Sound artist (1)
Building surveyor (1)	consultant (1)	Sound engineer (3)
Choreographer (3)	Leatherworker (1)	Tattooist (1)
Cinematographer (2)	Manager (2)	Venue manager (1)
Clothing, bags and jewellery	Manufacturing and sales (3)	Video producer (1)
designer/manufacturer (2)	Marketing (2)	Visual artist (15)
Community arts worker (3)	Media presenter, journalist,
Curator (1)	producer (7)

Separate to recorded interviews, organisers of festivals in Darwin were surveyed using a postal questionnaire. The bulk of questions in this were from a similar questionnaire used to assess the economic and cultural significance of festivals in southern States on the ARC Rural Festivals Project (DP0560032; see Gibson et al. 2009). That one chief investigator (Gibson) was present on both projects led to a similar method being used in the two projects. The Darwin survey had extra questions on how remoteness affected festivals; on Aboriginal input into festivals; and on whether proximity to Asia was beneficial. Of 39 festivals identified in Darwin and sent surveys, 13 were completed and returned (by a combination of music, environment, film, visual arts, food, community, gay and lesbian, and gardening festivals). As with interviews, it is not possible here to include a full breakdown of results from this survey. Interview material constitutes the bulk of our analysis around key themes of remoteness and proximity, with occasional integration of findings from the festival survey where appropriate.

The curse of remoteness

Several interviewees reported on the unsurprising truth that Darwin is distant from key centres of the creative industry, and thus is not well connected to important gatekeepers, opportunities, touring networks and sponsors. According to an arts manager,2 Darwin's remoteness from the Australian eastern seaboard was ‘a weakness, when you're in a national table and the needs of the Territory and parts of WA, Queensland, and South Australia—the more remote areas—are not necessarily given enough reference in developing some of the policy’ (interview, July 2007). Simple matters of critical mass and distance combined to make efforts to support arts activity difficult:

It's not that accessible, we don't have the opportunities for the rate bases in our urban areas to support arts development, we don't have a lot of the benefits that the eastern seaboard, or South Australia, or even Perth have in terms of their demographics, their numbers, their accessibility … we just don't have the population, we just don't have the same working conditions. We have escalated costs in arts delivery; even a tour costs a fortune. Artback told me a very funny story about having to hang artworks on fence posts, because there was nothing else. It's hard with those key players on those national tables, for them to understand what the actual working conditions are for our artists. They hear the words but they don't understand, and they're sick of hearing the words, because at the bottom line they go: ‘you've got two percent of the nation's population, come on, who cares!’ (Interview, April 2007)

Distance from key infrastructures and poor critical mass meant higher costs. Servicing Darwin's ‘local’ market was more costly, because that ‘local’ market was made up of far-flung remote communities, rather than more densely interconnected, bigger places. For a music promoter:

The only reason people don't come here is it's too expensive to bring five people on the plane when they're only going to play a few shows. The only people that tour here are people that come in their own bus and play the markets: two shows a day at the markets and stay for three weeks and play every show there is in the dry season. They're the only people that can really afford to, or people that are brought up for a one off for the Darwin Festival. (Interview, August 2007)

Festival organisers were asked how remoteness affected overall costs. Every one of the 13 festivals surveyed agreed that remoteness did increase their costs, although they were divided on the extent of this. Four said that remoteness affected the overall cost of staging the festival to a small extent; five said that remoteness affected them quite a lot; and three said that remoteness affected staging to a large extent. The most common costs incurred were transportation for imported exhibition materials and performers; and supplies for larger festivals (with local catering and staging businesses unable to meet their demands, meaning festivals had to look interstate).

Remoteness was also problematised by interviewees because it fostered cultural cringe, and made locals defensive. On the one hand, for a public art manager:

It's the sense of trying to be the latest thing at the Venice Biennale, when you should just be yourself, I think that's a disadvantage. There's the potential to value things from elsewhere, rather than valuing what's right under your nose, and that's a real disadvantage. (Interview, April 2007)

On the other hand, for a visual artist, remoteness manifest in a tendency of benefactors to demand that commissioned art needed to have a local hook—rather than facilitating artistic expression in whatever its format:

In Darwin they like the work to be about Darwin … if you were in Sydney you wouldn't be saying, ‘oh we want to make art about Sydney’. It's something that's a regional insecurity, [whereas] my art has a more universal thing. There's nothing in Darwin that particularly interests me, there's no real interesting materials to be found and I'm just not really interested in the vista and beautiful sunsets. (Interview, July 2007)

In Darwin, the danger of parochialism is ever-present (see also Andersen, this issue).

The pleasures of isolation

Isolation and small size combined to reduce connections to international networks. For a key figure in organising cultural festivals, ‘a lack of international and interstate influences is big’ (interview, June 2007), a sentiment repeated throughout many interviews. However, this kind of statement was often made by interviewees in the form of a juxtaposing sentence: ‘I thought that remote qua negative … BUT … remote/proximate qua positive.’ The perils of remoteness were quickly contrasted against positives, or affirmations about how Darwin was in turn proximate to other places and attractions. In pointing to the positives, interviewees may well have been ‘true believers’—committed to Darwin despite its limitations. Or perhaps creative workers were rationalising trade-offs to themselves (an extension of decisions to remain in Darwin rather than moving to southern States where connections and opportunities might be more widespread). Statements about the pleasures and benefits of isolation were broadly of three types: affirmations of the colonial/frontier context as a source of inspiration; claims about the benefits of working independently in an isolated place; and distance from national and international artistic trends as enabling comparatively laissez-faire artistic expression.

According to a film producer:

A lot of people come up here just because it's the frontier still, the old myth of it being the badlands or the outback and all that sort of stuff, which is great. In the arts we use that, because it's a big part of our identity and that's fine. (Interview, July 2007)

For a curator and visual artist, creativity was facilitated in Darwin because of its isolation and its proximity to nature—and because, in contrast to conventional wisdom in creative industries research, daily face-to-face interactions with other artists were absent:

Darwin's strength as a creative city is … the smallness of the place and that it seems that nature is right on your doorstep. It doesn't seem like that in other large cities. So, just being able to stretch your eyes across the harbour and go down to the beach and go for walks and see animals and birds around you, it's really important; that sense of isolation. When I was in Melbourne, there was a lot of visual stimulation; a lot of exhibitions around; everything seemed to come at me, just too many openings to go to, so many things to do. I like that in Darwin I can seek out my interests without being bombarded. I like that isolation. I feel like I can ground myself and have a stronger sense of personal identity without being part of something larger, not doing work like other people around you. (Interview, July 2007)

Indeed, remoteness was frequently celebrated by interviewees as creative ‘freedom’, distant from metropolitan trends, fashions and compulsions:

In some ways I see our isolation as an advantage … Those artists who really focus on their work with a level of integrity, and don't look at trying to be the latest thing, actually develop a practice that is grounded in something that is extraordinary, which is here. (Interview, June 2007)

These kinds of sentiments were linked to romantic ideals of the artist toiling in creative isolation. For the manager of a local dance company:

I think a large number of Australian artists who are developed and work in larger cities, tend to look very broadly, relatively esoterically about their art forms. That really could exist anywhere, as long as there's a black box that you can sort of hide in to do it. One of the things that makes Darwin special, culturally, is that isolation, that you're not influenced by what that critic says, or what that company says. (Interview, April 2007)

For a visual artist:

You can actually work in relative isolation in Darwin, so your work's not too influenced by what's going on. I think that what's happening in Darwin is a lot of artists are creating work that's raw, and you need vitality, it's not being pasteurised, or trying to pander to somebody else's ideas and theories, or aesthetics. (Interview, July 2007)

The local creative industry scene is eclectic. Hybridisations of urban, outback, traditional Aboriginal, tropical and contemporary Asian styles (in art, sculpture, music architecture) are made possible in Darwin (see below). In addition, if less obviously, small population size limits the possibilities of distinct ‘scenes’ forming around specific creative activities. While Melbourne might host autonomous creative communities around specific styles of music, subcultures, visual arts movements or design trends, in Darwin creative workers swap styles and locations, work in multiple arts categories, and network across diverse groups—as a survival strategy in a small town. For this reason it is not possible to theorise our results by creative sector—because rarely did creative workers stick to one genre or pursuit. For a musician:

The location and the size of the city doesn't allow for really strong cliques of people to form. You tend to interact with all sorts of people. Say if I was in Melbourne or Sydney and I was into electronic music, I could hang out with my electronic music friends, but there's just not the critical mass to do that here. So, I make weird electronic music, I'm in a rock band, a reggae band, I play in a Gamelan ensemble, there's so many different outlets that Darwin just exposes you to. (Interview, April 2007)

Creative identity-hopping enables fledgling artists to survive, and reflects the fluidity and comparative openness of cultural expressions in remote, small places.

Fictions of distance: postcolonial proximities

Perceptions of Darwin as remote from southern centres of creativity were contrasted against affirmations of Darwin's local cultural mix—its proximity, in other words, to Asia and major regions of Aboriginal culture and language. For Aboriginal creative workers, Darwin simply was not remote—it was home, central to their universe, networks, positionality. For an Aboriginal photographer:

I was very confident in Darwin. I was always told from the minute I was able to understand that this is your country, it doesn't matter who else is here, you belong here and so it wasn't even a thing to think about; it was just something that I knew as I grew up going through high school. I always feel totally comfortable in Darwin. (Interview, September 2007)

Darwin is a major urban centre at the heart of a string of networks between remote communities, as evident when places of work outside Darwin were mapped (see Figure 1). The resulting ‘spider-web’ of connections between remote Aboriginal communities and Darwin illustrates a different kind of regional proximity at work.

Figure 1.  Remote community networks: places of work cited in interviews with creative workers, 2007–08, as percentage of total number of places of work cited.

Maps courtesy of Chris Brennan-Horley.

For some non-Aboriginal creative workers, the possibility of Indigenous encounter was an attraction, sustaining a lineage of exploration of the frontier experience with echoes of novels such as Xavier Herbert's Capricornia, Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, feature films such as Walkabout and rock albums such as Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust (and even further back, to Rousseau and Gauguin). There was for some a ‘raw vitality’ of creativity in the tropics, at the edge of colonialism. The dance company manager described how:

when I originally decided to live here, it was certainly having that face to face contact with Indigenous Australia, which I didn't feel I'd ever had before in my life, and I know, for me, that changed my view of what I was as an artist. I thought I knew what it meant to be an Australian, but certainly, coming up here and having that contact with Indigenous Australia, I have totally had to completely wipe out all those things that I thought I was and reassess what it actually did mean to Australia—to be an Australian. (Interview, April 2007)

Indeed, isolation as authenticity has fed the critical reception of Top End Aboriginal art and music in the national and international press—words like ‘pure’ and ‘original’ infuse descriptions of Aboriginal artistic practice and music; as evidenced in reviews of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu's highly successful 2008 album Gurrumul—which emphasised his ‘pure voice’, his uncorrupted music about his life and country (in the Territory's Top End region—not far from Darwin). Aboriginal art and music is made ‘authentic’ through perceptions of the geographical distances involved in its production and distribution—as with world music more broadly—and a degree of legitimacy stemming from perceptions of disconnectedness from the machinations of urban capitalism (see Dunbar-Hall & Gibson 2004). Awareness that this critical distance might be achieved in Darwin was a genuine reason why some creative workers moved there. More simply, too, proximity to local Aboriginal creative workers fuelled new kinds of expedient, hybrid design, as an architect with an award-winning local firm explained:

We have great connections to the Indigenous culture up here. Part of what we're doing on the entertainment centre is we've commissioned Maningrida [community Aboriginal art centre] to do a major part of the public artwork … We're able to access that skill and expertise and the artists quite easily; they're two minutes away at the centre; there's a really easy communication line. So you build on these relationships. That's what we've been trying to do, is build relationships with the artist community, bringing in their expertise into what we do; to add a layer of interest and a layer of detail, and a layer of what we think is more about the Territory, instead of importing materials from down south, or getting anything from China … the buildings all started looking the same in Sydney, Melbourne. (Interview, April 2007)

Proximity to Aboriginal culture was overlaid with discussion of Darwin's proximity to Asia. For a visual artist, ‘instead of looking down there [to southern States], we tend to look to our nearer neighbours for our inspiration and our stimulus’ (interview, July 2007). According to a key figure at the Darwin Theatre Company ‘the proximity to Asia makes a difference … Timor's just over the water really; it's closer to us than anything else. It's quicker to get to Timor than it is to Katherine, which is the next town down the road’ (interview, April 2007). The General Manager of a major Darwin festival described its role in reinscribing an imagined geography of Darwin:

We're reflecting our geographic position. We sit in Darwin and draw a circle around, we kind of try and programme work from there, so we look at work from Indonesia and Singapore and Papua New Guinea and some Pacific islands as well. (Interview, April 2007)

This amalgam of cultural proximities in a small city produced a setting for creative activity cherished by many workers. For a visual artist:

Darwin's too small for one culture to isolate themselves. In southern cities you're able to just live in one suburb and never leave it, and not have to mix too much with other people, but Darwin's never been like that. Asian people, white people, Mediterranean and European people, Aboriginal people, all mix in and grow up together. It's not something that you really think about until you go somewhere else.

The dance company manager emphasised that:

We have a unique cultural diversity here which has a different presence to other cities. What I'm talking about is our closeness to Asia, our closeness to Indigenous culture … We're not a ghettoised community. If I look at my friend's network there's a whole heap of people from different cultures that's very natural for most people in Darwin. I think from a creative perspective, access to that is totally inspiring. What does it mean to be an Australian artist who actually lives in Asia, who actually lives really close to the original Indigenous people of this country? I feel very fortunate in that. (Interview, April 2007)

For some creative workers, building networks into Asia was a simple matter of increasing audiences and sales. Darwin was a cost-effective place to trade into Asia. A graphic designer reminded us that:

there are thousands of tourists a year that come from Japan and Asia, specifically to purchase Aboriginal art, and they travel out to communities like Maningrida. When I was at the grand final at Tiwi Islands, they also had the footy art sale, and people were going home with trolley loads full of prints. (Interview, March 2008)

For a visual artist:

Darwin's geographical position is paramount … the geographical placement of Darwin is the thing that most appeals to me … it's so close to Asia. I can travel to Jakarta in a matter of hours for a relatively affordable price which makes my portfolio as an artist in an Australian context, more, almost more domestic in a sense, that it's more controllable by me. It's more common for my colleagues in Sydney or Melbourne to think about going to Asia as a major event, so they would have to get funding; I can fly on Tiger Air for a weekend to simply visit friends.

[Interviewer: And do you gain inspiration from those travels that you would then bring back to Australia?]

Not so much inspiration, I gain market. (Interview, June 2007)

For the dance company:

Apart from anything, it's also more viable financially for us to bring some of their [Philippine] artists to here to work with us, for us to travel; it's hugely cheaper than us bringing someone from Melbourne or Sydney to Darwin. (Interview, April 2007)

Yet for all the talk of proximity to Asia, and of multiculturalism as assets, there was a somewhat uneven translation of this into actual practices. Linkages and networks with Timor, Indonesia and the Philippines took time and patience; some measures of success had been achieved (notably for dance companies and for the Darwin Festival), but for many Asia was still viewed in terms of opportunities and general talk than in real or specific activities. For 6 of the 13 surveyed festivals, proximity to Asia was said to have no positive influence at all. For the public art manager, ‘I think one advantage that is very rarely taken up is that proximity with Southeast Asia. It's starting to happen, but I think that not enough happens in that direction’ (interview, April 2007). One impediment repeatedly cited was the problem of gaining support funding from federal and Territory arts agencies for international linkages, given that the arts has been considered a marginal ‘cultural’ rather than economic development concern: ‘it's easy to fund someone from Australia to go to do a residency, but if you're one of our artists here who'd like to bring back a large performance, perhaps from Bali, to be part of our festivals and working with the schools, it's difficult to attract funding’ (arts worker, interview, July 2007). One theatre company started:

a relationship with a company in Timor and we're going to do a co-production. To do this I have to find corporate funding because I can't use NT arts funding. I've looked into arts funding from other sources like the Australia Council but there's no real mechanisms for us to co-produce with another company in another country. (Interview, April 2007)

Despite many taking advantage of Darwin's tropical proximity to Asia, national borders, assumptions that creative industries are ‘cultural’ rather than commercial, and the limits of public funding have prevailed.

Conclusions

The broad cultural mix that you get here, as an artist, I find that incredibly stimulating, and as an Australian, I find that a really interesting place to explore—what does it mean, who am I, you know, who am I in that context? (Local dance company, interview, April 2008)

This article contributes to an emerging geographical literature in creative industries research which extends from ‘local’ case studies to open out and engage with relational networks of trade and touring, and the circulation of people, goods and ideas across scales (Coe & Johns 2004; Kong et al. 2006; Rantisi et al. 2006; Waitt & Gibson 2009). Darwin is remote, and yet also occupies a liminal space, on the edge of one large continent, and thus proximate to another; a place grappling with its (recent) colonial legacy and uncertain future. Insights from this case study show how multiple, sometimes overlapping relational geographies of remoteness and proximity jostle for discursive space in the lives and perceptions of creative artists (cf. Ridanpää 2005). Remoteness matters for everyone in Darwin at one level, but is also a state of being in which people unevenly invest or believe; everyday life and work is always perceived in relation to other points of reference (wherever they might be).

Distance can contribute significantly to costs in terms of importing materials and talent, and to exporting them. Touring exhibitions or performers is not a cheap undertaking from Darwin. Singapore or Jakarta is as cost-effective as Melbourne, which can create its own unique opportunities. For some creative practitioners the relative distance from other centres was a boon; it allowed them to develop creatively, free to pursue their own vision, unfettered by the demands of metropolitan trends, fashion and funding imperatives. For others, the isolation was a professional isolation, where one yearned for the stimulation of a competitive environment.

While to much of the rest of the country Darwin appears far away and remote, for the creative practitioners who live there the distance from the Australian eastern seaboard also meant proximity to Asia (and the rest of the world). Indeed, while distance was clearly an issue for many, especially those with family interstate, in an age of relatively affordable air travel, not to mention communication and mail order via the Internet, the idea of remoteness ‘as lack’ was rare, and Darwin's unique proximities were quickly emphasised. Remoteness is as much a state of mind as a geographical reality.

Acknowledgements

This project was funded as an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP0667445; 2005–2009). We extend thanks to the wider research team—Tess Lea, Donal Fitzpatrick, Chris Brennan-Horley, Karen Hughes and Francesca Baas-Becking—for their various contributions to the project from which this paper stems.

Notes

1. Aware of the debates about what constitutes the ‘creative’ industries, and of the risk of arbitrariness in including or excluding certain sectors (Cunningham 2002; Markusen et al. 2008), we adopted a catholic approach to what ‘creative industries’ might be in Darwin. The British government's definition proved a useful starting point—including advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and computer games, television and radio (www.culture.gov.uk/creative_industries/default.htm). Further augmentation ensued, with categories and occupations added to mesh with the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Framework for Culture and Leisure Statistics (ABS 2007).

2. In order to conform to university ethics regulations, interview quotes have been made anonymous in this article.