Community arts in Australia: An overview

In the Foreword to Gay Hawkins' book, From Nimbin to Mardi Gras (!"#), Tony Bennett notes that 'the concepts of art and community are each of them capable of generating a multiplicity of con$icting meanings and interpretations. When the two are brought together, therefore, a good deal of semantic friction is bound to be generated' (p. ix). Certainly, the term 'Community arts' has numerous connotations and denotations - and this is a continuing source of confusion and argument. Or, as Owen Kelly (!"%&) has expressed it, 'Community arts is a general term for a group of cultural activities which the practitioners recognize as having common features but whose precise boundaries remain undrawn' (p. !). And in the years since Kelly wrote his seminal work, we now talk of global communities and digital communities; this too, has implications for the notion of community arts.