Arts Council of Australia

Is an organisation linking nine bodies which operate within the area of community arts. The six Australian States, the ACT and the Northern Territory each has an autonomous arts council (e.g. the Queensland Arts Council; the Arts Council of Australia, Tasmania Division) which is represented on the board of a federal Arts Council of Australia. This body is also autonomous and in 1978-83 was the largest client of the Community Arts Board of the Australia Council. In those years the Community Arts Board's allocation to the Arts Council of Australia was distributed to the federal division, mainly for national and co-ordinating activities, and to the State and territory organisations, which are also funded from the respective State governments and from private sources. In 1983 a new policy was announced which increased decentralisation and provided for direct Community Arts Board allocations to the State and territory organisations. The State Arts Councils have numerous regional branches (more than 300 in 1994).

The various Arts Councils traditionally have helped to provide performing arts experiences for schools and for communities outside metropolitan centres; in recent years exhibitions, festivals, summer schools and workshops have more regularly come within their ambit. The Arts Council movement had its origin in the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), modelled on an equivalent British organisation and formed in 1943 by the singer Dorothy Helmrich; it was centred in NSW, where an arts council, sometimes called the Arts Council of Australia in the 1950s, was established in 1946. Arts Councils were formed soon after in some other States and territories (e.g. SA in 1946, Tasmania in 1951), but lack of adequate funding prevented development until the 1960s. In 1966 the Arts Council of Australia, first proposed in the 1940s, was established, receiving its first funds from the Australian Council for the Arts in 1969. In 1973 the last State or territory arts council, the WA Arts Council, was established, following those in Victoria (1971), the Northern Territory (1967), SA (reformed in 1965 after lapsing in 1952), ACT (reformed 1962 after lapsing in 1952), and Queensland (1961).

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