Asking the question

 

In a few short weeks, the last funding round for 2015 for the Australia Council of the Arts will close. You may have heard mention of the changes in the Australian arts funding arrangements – we appreciated your input and sought to incorporate your views into our submission to the Australian Senate on this matter. Thank you to those of you who provided thoughtful feedback and comment to our efforts to highlight the importance of diversity in the arts, and the role that government support plays in our community. Watch this space for the report which is scheduled for tabling on 14 October 2015.

In the mean time, we would like to ask for your input again, this time in shaping Peril’s funding application to the Australia Council. You see, like a lot of small organisations, we’re conscious that we are dependent on year to year grants – and as is the case every year, there’s no guarantee that Peril will receive funding in the future. So, if this might be our last Australia Council application for a while, we’d like to make it count.

See this little contact form below? Well, if you have the time to put some thought to what it is you like to read here at Peril, we will put the time to time to try and reflect that in our grant, as best as is possible. Obviously, if you’d like to read about first person interviews with Asian Australians on the moon, our budget may not stretch that far.

This is what we aim to do, which might help guide your thoughts off the moon and closer to our slightly more realistic aims:

Mission Statement
Peril aims to be an active multimedia platform for Asian-Australian voices that empowers the creativity, agency and representation of Asian-Australian people in arts, society and culture.

What we do
Peril seeks to showcase new literature through diverse forms, including poetry, drama, translations, creative writing, memoir, essays, biographical profiles, interviews and other story structures. We are also interested in writing about the visual arts, theatre and film and other cultural arts practices. To understand these practices, we also profile leading and emerging arts practitioners, particularly Asian Australian practitioners. We look to foster dialogue and conversation around issues of diverse cultural production and news issues of Asian Australian interest by supporting non-fiction, journalism and opinion pieces via our blog.

Peril is also an active contributor to the Australian literary and creative arts communities, hosting and participating in a range of workshops, panels, seminars and events that look to engage the community in cultural production that is representative of the diversity of the Australian community and relevant in a globally interconnected world.

Peril welcomes contributions from all, but will prioritise Asian-Australian and contributors of colour or contributors of diverse backgrounds. Peril is inclusive of people of diverse sexualities and genders.

Peril acknowledges that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the original owners and custodians of the land that we live and work on.

If you think we can do this better – then we are keen to hear your ideas!

What kind of things would you like to see Peril doing with its time and your taxpayer money? Do you want to hear more about particular issues? Would you be interested in being involved in co-creating content? Would you like to suggest writers we should be commissioning? If we decided to step off the digital platform and into IRL, would you like to attend a forum, workshop, or audition launch? Are you interested in learning more about history of Asian Australians in Australia’s cultural life – academic or otherwise investigations of the role and impact of previous generations? Can we share skills so that you can share your stories more widely, would you like to learn to pitch, would you like to intern with us, would you like to be a reviewer?

As we said in our submission to the senate – consider for a moment, the Australian cultural landscape without the likes of Adam Aitken, Alice Pung, Annette Shun Wah, Bella Li, Benjamin Law, Gary Paramanathan, Hoa Pham, Ivy Alvarez, Lian Low, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Michelle Cahill, Merlinda Bobis, Omar Musa, OuYang Yu, Owen Leong, Quan Yeomans, Su Dharmapala, Tom Cho and William Yang just some of Peril’s featured artists, contributors, editors and volunteers.

We’d like to add even more voices to that cultural conversation. Hopefully you can help us add yours.

Feel free to get in touch – sooner rather than later is obviously better for the purposes of this 1 September grant round, but realistically – the door is open all year round. You can also comment below, if that works better for you.

Author: Eleanor Jackson

Eleanor Jackson is a Filipino Australian poet, performer, arts producer and community radio broadcaster. Eleanor Jackson is a former Editor in Chief and Poetry Editor of Peril and currently Chair of the Board.

Your thoughts?