Fringe to famous: bohemians, entrepreneurs, audiences and the enabling state

Since the 1980s, there has been an increasingly fertile cross-over between `alternative? arts practice and popular culture industries. Yet this cross-over between what Pierre Bourdieu called the market of limited and extensive production is not new, and a recent historical study of Australian bohemia by this article?s co-author, identified a long tradition stretching back to the nineteenth century of creative practitioners circulating between small scale experimental initiatives in art and culture and the mainstream publishing, design, cinema, broadcasting and other cultural industries. The paper considers how this circulation between markets has been important for Australia?s creative economy as an `innovation system? and its contributed to the `national dreaming? and other diverse forms of identity. In the context of the Federal Government?s 2013 Creative Australia national cultural policy, the paper outlines a larger research project of identifying the institutional relationships and policy settings, which favour or inhibit translations for the margins to the mainstream, from fringe to famous.